Consumers and enterprises increasingly rely on electronic messages, such as emails, to accomplish tasks and/or to conduct day-to-day business operations. Because electronic messages often include important text and documents, organizations may regularly back up such messages in an attempt to prevent data loss.
Unfortunately, conventional backup methods may not be effective for some email clients. For example, an email archive file (such as a PST file created by MICROSOFT OUTLOOK) may remain locked while an email client is open, preventing conventional backup methods from freely accessing the email archive file. Backup software may circumvent this problem by taking a snapshot of the entire email volume and performing backup operations on the snapshot. This approach, however, may present problems for backing up emails for some email clients, such as MICROSOFT OUTLOOK. As there is no VSS writer for a PST file to ensure the consistency of the PST file, the backup software may take the snapshot when the email archive file is in an inconsistent state, resulting in an incomplete or corrupted backup of the email archive file.